


kyoto protocol

by khepria



Category: Chihayafuru
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-05
Updated: 2014-05-05
Packaged: 2018-01-22 01:22:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,162
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1570763
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/khepria/pseuds/khepria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Shinobu was six years old, Kyoto was a place four hours away by train.</p>
            </blockquote>





	kyoto protocol

**Author's Note:**

  * For [transversely](https://archiveofourown.org/users/transversely/gifts).



> dedicated to one of my dearest fandom friends. 
> 
> to [transversely](http://transversely.tumblr.com) and to all others: i hope you enjoy reading this.
> 
> (as well, a very warm thank-you to [kuruk](http://archiveofourown.org/users/kuruk), who stayed up with me and spurred me onwards when writing seemed impossible and this was revealing itself to be a very long piece telling very little, as well for editing.)

 

 

 

 

“If she wants to stay here, then she needs to learn a talent.” 

These were the words that spurred your mother to enroll you into a plethora of extracurricular activities the way that one would pick out dresses at a department store. For your mother’s sake, you put on a leotard and tippy-toed with other bright-eyed girls, raising your arms high above your head in faux daintiness. Two lessons after ballet, you dropped your brush into black ink and liberally painted dripping kanji and smiling faces onto paper screens. A week later, you paid no heed to instruction and bent green stems and picked at flower petals to form geometrical patterns with the remnants of a bouquet of daisies. Rinse and repeat, and it was a cycle of apathy. You cared for none of it because you were six years old, too disinterested to partake in anything that demanded a singular, particular methodology, anything that marked success through a strict and rigid definition, and too young to understand that staying at your grandmother’s house and not with your father in Tokyo was contingent on you uncovering some hidden talent.

Her focus on you was at its heaviest three weeks after moving to Kyoto. Of all the vague memories from the start of your new life in the old capitol, you remembered one evening before dinnertime kneeling on carpet in your room while your mother brushed your dark, wavy hair.  She had forced out tangles with a quaking hand using more force than necessary. She pleaded with you to take to a hobby, any hobby will do. You didn’t understand the urgency, why it was so important that you pick something no matter how ill-fitting. Instead, you focused on the glittering stickers placed haphazardly on your hand and how cute they were, how happy and bright. It distracted you from your hurting scalp, smarting after a particularly harsh pull, and from the way that your mother scrunched her nose in frustrated despair, uncomprehending why you took to none of the activities that she had chosen for you. When you idly think back to that springtime, instead of remembering pale pink blossoms fluttering in mild breeze, you remember the pale pink flush that marked your mother’s desperation on her otherwise regal face.

Kyoto was a new beginning by returning to your roots. Dusk gave into nighttime, but also eventually to dawn that marks a new day. To your mother, it was forgetting the bright rising sun that swept her life eastwards, and returning to her childhood home to relearn that hobby was synonymous with life skills and purpose. You hadn’t lived long enough, accumulated enough life experience to need a fresh start, but that was the lesson that your mother wretchedly wanted to impart onto you.

 

*

 

Omi Jingu is exactly the way you remember it: bright red, as red as the Tatsuna river in autumn.

Your palms are still damp from the water basin when you toss a 100-yen coin into the shrine’s offering box, pull at braided rope, and bow deeply twice. The knell resonates through your body as if the calcium matrix of your bone was the same as the bell’s struck brass. You dry your hands on the heavy navy fabric of your pleated skirt before you clap twice, the sound crisp. You pray the way that you recite the hundred poems, a focused mantra perfected over years since age twelve, and you mark its end with a slight, final bow.

You don’t wish for tomorrow’s conquest but you can feel the surety of triumph imbuing itself into you when you turn away from the shrine, and it only shines brighter when you pass through the center of the straw _chinowa kuguri_. 

You descend down level cement steps and begin the ten minute walk to Lake Biwa.

 

*

 

Tomorrow comes, and so does victory.

You smile prettily for the cameras and bring the trophy closer to your face for the photographs that will be in tomorrow’s newspaper. It is heavy and solid in your hands, but the joy of this tournament placates you the way that water vapour quenches thirst. Your wish doesn’t come true, and so winning comes too easily. Miracles don’t happen simply because a girl had spent four years wishing for it, nor so cheaply, so you dedicate yourself anew for next year.

 

*

 

The most exhilarating match of your lifetime was not the one that earned you the title of Queen at age fourteen against a lackluster player eight years older than you, but at age eleven against a boy your age. 

It was the third time that you were matched up against Wataya Arata, and always the first round. The matches have been fixed this way ever since you made class A at age nine. The national school-level tournament was the only time you were allowed to play against other children your age, and Myojo society was thorough in ensuring that you did not soften your play after four rounds of sure, easy victories. You felt your sharpest and most resentful when you lost by three cards again, the same as last year. Your limbs were still trembling and tingling as residual adrenaline circulated from your veins to your lungs to your heart and back out to the rest of your body. “Thank-you for the match,” you had said, these words well-rehearsed, the words that always accompanied your end-match bow, but you cannot let yourself grow accustomed to losing to Wataya after losing to him for the third year in a row. You thanked him sullenly, but you meant it honestly because Wataya was very much like you; before him, you didn’t know that you could play earnestly against someone your age and have them play you again and again without reluctancy.

Your palms found their way back to your thighs and you watched as Wataya collected the cards, the victor’s right, and a stark reminder of your inability to retrieve all of your friends from the field and of your loss. Anger didn’t surge through you then like it did after the first and second loss. It was more like a maddening frustration that you lost to a boy who picked up cards inelegantly and brutishly. Their victor should not be someone who was fine with sweeping six cards to capture only one. It annoyed her to know that in those plays, Wataya thought very little of the other five cards; they deserved to be treated better. 

When he finished, Wataya held out his hand. “Shinobu-chan, your cards,” he prompted and you gave him your stack of acquired cards wordlessly. Your fingers brushed against his in the exchange, and it warmed the tepid tension between the two of you.

Before he begun counting your twenty-three, you comment, “that’s familiar of you.” Your smile was a careful upturn of your lips, cordial in form without the sentiment spreading to the rest of your face. In past games, he had always called you Wakamiya. 

Your words gave him pause, and he looked at you with mild surprise before it gave way to a laugh. Wataya didn’t explain why the sudden change in formality, but instead offered, “you can call me Arata if you want.” He picked up the top card from your accumulated deck, and it is _Lady Ise_ , poem number 19. “You played really well today.”

You didn’t reciprocate because his win over you said plenty on _his_ playing today, but your smile was warmer when you thanked him for the kind words. They were the same from every opponent, but from Wataya it was very country, a distinctly different quality compared to cooler politeness of the usual Kyoto players you played with. He put the cards back neatly into their green box and closed it before turning to give his grandfather a pleased, expectant look.

The game over, you matched his enthused happiness with equal parts relief that unlike him, your grandmother was not witness to your loss and lingering disappointment. When you finally stood up and your mother moved towards the exit, you shook your head vehemently. You won’t leave like you had previous years; you were going to stay this time, and watch the entire tournament carefully. Every match that Wataya played. His victory was certain, and it is only because you knew he was going to be the national tournament’s fifth-time winner that you weren’t as agitated with your early loss. You shouldn’t (and didn’t) care too much about losing to Wataya, but there was something aggravating about consistently losing first round as if you were a green, unripe apple. Ise-sensei couldn’t have anticipated how strongly the resentment losing first round for three consecutive years stuck with you, didn’t know how uninspired you were watching Wataya play someone inferior to you in skill in every way duing the final match, and how you had spent the entire match thinking it should have been then that you faced Wataya and not first round. When the tournament was done and over with, people will know and remember Nishida as second-best because he is runner-up. 

You resolved to do better next year, to smoothen out the lingering kinks that left you stumbling inelegantly after cards. Next year, you will have victory and you will take it with poise matching five hundred verses. This, you promised yourself, and perhaps to your grandmother in secret because she was the one to direct you to your final introduction to karuta. You wanted to evolve your play so that when grandmother cannot come watch you, it will be disheartening instead of relieving like it has been for the past three years.

You didn’t make this vow for Ise-sensei, who encouraged and cursed you to this woeful, despairing feeling when you lost first round. (You let go of the bitterness of early defeat without his meddling guidance. You framed it differently: second-best was synonymous to last loser, and that was not how you wanted karuta societies to remember you for the next year. It was easier having the anonymity of first round loser.) Nor for your mother, who didn’t care that you had lost to the grandson of an eternal _meijin_ , a boy who surely dedicated as many practice as you, but instead chose to focus on secondhand embarrassment from you losing to a class B player when you neatly defeated men three times his age in class A tournaments.

Next year was your bright, shining beacon.

 

*

 

Poem 19 reads:

Even for a time short as a piece of the reeds in Naniwa’s marsh, we must never meet again: is that what you are asking me?

 

*

 

Next year came, and _Lady Ise_ was like a prophecy come true. First round passed you by and it was a much easier victory than the heaving effort that losing to Arata was. You even won the tournament that year, and your mother was pleased with this turnaround, as if being crowned best of your age group was a noteworthy accomplishment without securing a victory against Arata.

It’s not that you were disappointed with your newfound intimacy with victory, so when Arata failed to show up the following year, you pretend that you weren’t disenchanted and that it wasn’t lonely facing opponents whose spirits were so easy to break. 

When you realized that no one talked about Arata in passing anymore, you let curiousity get the better of you, and you investigated what could have happened to prompt his unannounced hiatus from karuta. (What you uncovered left your heart aching for him one hundred and fifty kilometers away. You sent handwritten condolences and a bouquet of white chrysanthemums, unsigned because you weren’t sure if it was inappropriate almost two years after the fact. It was the sentiment that was more important.) 

By third year, you were the undisputed champion of the national-level middle school tournament. You became Queen. People begun to forget the hopes they had pinned onto Wataya Arata and you forgot what it was like to lose. 

As long as he bowed out from karuta, you were invincible. 

 

*

 

Your father was the one to name you Shinobu, and traditionally it meant to endure, to bear. What a wretchedly masculine name, your mother occasionally groused. She hadn't wanted that kind of life for you, her whimsical child, but had ensured it by divorcing your father and returning to her mother’s home in Kyoto. You thought it was wonderful, this prayer your father had imparted onto you. To have loved you so much that he wanted you to endure, to bear what you must to find successes later on in life. For all of your mother's complaints about you, the one thing that she didn't (and couldn't) deny and berate you for was your work ethic towards the few goals you care for. It truly was a thoughtful name. 

詩 - the _shi_ of your name - meant poem, so to you, it was inevitable fate that had led you to karuta. It was a fraying red string that had caught your attention, leading your gaze to a dusty, inordinate chest. When you lifted its cover, within its contents was a box set of printed cards, each inscribed with poems and accompanied by pretty pictures. You spent fifteen minutes looking through the different cards, admiring each illustration, only putting them away hastily back into their container when you heard your mother’s shrill calling for you. You had forgoten about them for two weeks until a similar set was revealed at a play date, and you were enamoured all over again. You returned to the cards that very evening. Your fingers traced ink, carefully and deliberately placed. They were already worn around the edges, already well-loved long before you discovered them and learnt enough kanji to read them, before you knew the verses well enough to mouth them in earnest in-between lessons.

It was also because your mother couldn’t appreciate your name that she couldn’t appreciate why you were drawn to karuta. You remembered the afternoon that you cried, the day that her patience snapped like a flower stem, and your mother snatched the cards from you and threw them out into the hallway. She yelled at you angrily about your lack of life purpose, about how without it you haven’t earned the right to call your grandmother’s house home, and it hurt more than when she detangled your hair heavy-handedly with a rigid-bristled brush. She didn’t understand you (doesn’t understand you), always trying to fit you into old, well-worn clothes that had fit her, that your grandmother had undeniably approved of two and a half decades ago. Perhaps it was fate too that whispered to the wood supports of the household and summoned your grandmother to you, because it wasn’t (couldn’t be) your mother to soothe the burgeoning terror she instilled in you and placate your sobbing. She lived too vicariously through you for that.

(暢  - the _nobu_ portion of your name, meant freely, unrestrained. You didn't think too much on this portion of your name, on how you didn't quite live up to it as vibrantly and surely as you did the _shi_.)

 

*

 

You see Arata on the steps leading to Omi Jingu on the year anniversary of your last prayer for nationals, and you are glad (to see him, to play him once more without an ensured first round match-up, for the opportunity to prove that between the two of you that you are now the stronger player). Over four years, you collected countless victories and he will be your milestone win. Tomorrow’s champion will be the one who dedicated themselves wholly to the game without fail, the one who truly loves karuta.

(You continue past him. It's all muscle memory now: the bowing when you give your bi-annual offering to the gods, the prompt bell ringing, and two claps that follow. You don’t pray for anything this year. You bow again. The luck parted from the _chinowa kuguri_ is enough to sustain your victory streak. You’re okay without.)

 

*

 

You don’t lose in the first round. You win your second, third, and fourth matches like you do every tournament since you were twelve years old. It is easy victory, up until Arata.

You lose by two cards. It surprises you with how much it stings to lose when you were so close to your childhood ambition of trouncing him once and for all. Five years worth of work and dedication should have translated to an improvement of a minimum of three cards, not one. Perhaps Ise-sensei is right about becoming soft after allowing yourself to be unchallenged for so long. You’re trembling again. In less than one hour, you’re unravelling and remembering what took five years to forget: the sour taste of defeat.

Arata looks at you as if your match reminds him of something long forgotten too. “Shinobu-chan, you’re running a fever,” he says and his palm on your forehead eases the palpable, tense atmosphere of this room. “Why did you play? You didn’t have to push yourself so hard.”

You endure the unpleasant heat radiating from your face and the discomfort of being simultaneously lukewarm, humid June and cool, biting Lake Biwa lake water because that is your namesake. You bear through the pyrexia caused by yesterday’s rain because you spent five years wishing and hoping for this match, and drenched you stood in front of the tournament organizers, pleading for forgiveness for transgressions that were not your own. You push yourself because there are people who raise their hands trying to reach you, striving to improve, the way that you raised your hands in prayer every year at Omi Jingu and tried to reach Arata, your consistent benchmark for self-improvement. You are here, kneeling on worn tatami mats, because you knew better than to waste a fulfilled prayer.

You offer none of these explanations. Instead, you tell him: “Of course I did. I’m the Queen.”

 

*

 

On the old, historied cobblestone roads leading back home, you realize a few things. Your childhood was a dusky autumn, a time of westward change. Middle school was dark winter, a stagnant and unchanging environment kept that way through continuous frost. It was cold because, unknown to you then, your world’s tilt had changed subtly, away from the sun that had warmed you briefly on those odd autumn days reminiscent of spring. It was dark, because that very sun had long travelled past west horizon, and was on its journey eastward to rise. The frost didn’t form diamond-sharp crystals inside you because you were a _koi_ fish underneath a thick, well-intended layer of frozen water and it wasn’t until long after translucent ice melted and overcast clouds parted that you realized that winter had passed. 

The most important understanding you come to is that Arata is your Kyoto, your new beginning by returning to familiar roots. His return marks a new dawn, and finally, your purpose becomes clearer. 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> a very long telling of shinobu's name poem (40):  
>  _though i would hide it, in my face it still appears--my fond, secret love. and now he questions me: "is something bothering you?"_
> 
> translated versions of the 100 poems were taken from [ogura hyakunin isshu](http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/japanese/hyakunin/frames/hyakuframes.html).
> 
> this was challenging writing this as i was swimming with many possible ideas, all very different from each other. this story itself had transformed to a very different piece than how i originally conceptualized it, but... here it is, palatable for consumption.


End file.
